I first wrote about the church as a place of hope and healing in 2013. I remember reflecting on how my friendships in the church had met me in a dark season and what it meant to me that they walked with me through it. A few years later, I wrote Closer Than a Sister: How Union with Christ Helps Friendships to Flourish. My hope in writing that book was to encourage deeper, richer friendships among women in the church. Friendships that would reflect the “one-anothering” admonitions we find throughout the New Testament. Friendships that go deeper than shared interests or hobbies, that are honest and vulnerable about the real things of life. Friendships that are rooted in our union with Christ. This has since become my most popular retreat topic and for good reason—retreats are a sweet time of fellowship and are ideal places to develop richer friendships with others. I’ve loved meeting sisters in Christ across the country and encouraging them to grow in their relationships with one another.
The past year or so, I’ve been busy on a new book, an editorial project, about how the church can help hurting women. CDM, the publishing arm of the PCA, reached out to me to see if I would be interested in being the editor of a project called, Alongside Care: A Vision for Churches to Care for Women in Crisis. This book includes the voices of multiple authors, myself included. It explores the Bible’s call for the church to care for the Body—to encourage one another, bear one another’s burdens, exhort one another, speak the truth in love to one another, and more. It also shares how different churches have developed ministries to do just that, specifically ministries meeting the needs of hurting women in the church. It explores creating a team of women equipped and trained to come alongside women in the church who are in crisis, what that looks like and ways to develop such a team.
I’m excited about this project. I’ve enjoyed working with each of the writers. I love that it reflects how churches are diverse in terms of their resources, size, and membership and how it encourages readers to take the content and contextualize it to their particular congregation. It is my prayer that it will encourage churches to consider ways in which they can care for the hurting women in their pews.
To learn more about this project, click here.
